Abstract

Summary writing, illustrating a writer’s level of comprehension and explanation of a text, is an essential but demanding skill in academic writing. However, studies on how individual factors may affect one’s, especially second language (L2) writers’ summary writing abilities remain scarce. One particular focus on effectively assisting learners’ summary writing is to look at the roles of writing self-efficacy and strategy use in summary writing. Therefore, the current study aims to investigate the relationship between writing self-efficacy and strategy use in summary writing tasks and the predictive effects of the two constructs on summary writing performance. Two hundred seventy-two participants were recruited from an undergraduate EAP (English for academic purposes) course in a Chinese university, and they were asked to complete two questionnaires, the Questionnaire of English Writing Self-Efficacy (QEWSE) and the Summary Writing Strategy Use Inventory (SWSUI), before and after a summary writing task, respectively. The correlation results suggested a significant positive correlation between writing self-efficacy and summary writing strategy use. The results of the regression models indicated that the two constructs exerted significant predictive effects on writing scores individually and collectively. Among the subcategories of writing self-efficacy and summary writing strategy, self-efficacy for organization and cognitive strategies were significant predictors of summary writing performance.

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